In the early 1970s, an editor at the publisher Hart-Davis, MacGibbon phoned the climber and magazine editor Ken Wilson with a proposition. A rather dry German mountaineering book of selected climbs had been doing well. Would Wilson do something similar in Britain? His response was typical, both for its directness and its vision: “You won’t want to do the kind of book I would like.” But Wilson, who has died aged 75, got his way, and in 1974 published Hard Rock, among the most influential climbing books of the 20th century.
For what was essentially a collection of illustrated essays by different authors about the best rock climbs in Britain, Wilson – thanks to his boundless energy and already considerable reputation as a guiding force in the climbing world – was able to attract leading climbers such as Chris Bonington and Royal Robbins, as well as the best climbing writers, including Jim Perrin and Ed Drummond. He even got an essay from Al Alvarez. As Wilson had promised, the book made no concessions to the uninitiated. He knew his audience inside out, had an apparently limitless appetite for work and had no time for the kind of sensationalised froth many of his competitors traded in. Authenticity was key and his customers loved him for it. Ultimately, he helped shape the world he was describing.
Wilson followed Hard Rock with a string of similar titles, and with the book distributor Ken Vickers launched a publishing house, Diadem, which they later sold to Hodder & Stoughton. Following Hodder’s merger with Headline, Wilson left and started again with a new company, Bâton Wicks. His speciality was the compendium. Mountaineering suits the shorter essay, and Wilson produced two fat volumes of them, editing the first, The Games Climbers Play (1978). He then published collections of the work of past heroes, particularly of the great exploratory mountaineers of the 1930s, Eric Shipton and HW Tilman, as well as the environmentalist John Muir.
Having started climbing and walking with the scouts in the early 1950s, Wilson had a firm understanding of the British hill-walking world, and published books for it that had all the depth of knowledge and integrity of those he produced on mountaineering. They were equally popular, not least Irvine Butterfield’s The High Mountains of Britain and Ireland (1986) and several collaborations with the walking writer Richard Gilbert. You could hardly be a hill walker or climber in Britain without having one of Wilson’s books on your shelves.
He was born in Solihull, son of John, a stationery salesman, and his wife, Blanche (nee Colman), and after leaving Solihull school studied architecture and photography at Birmingham College of Art. He moved to London and spent four years working for the architectural photographer Henk Snoek. When a job came up running a Youth Hostel Association magazine called Mountain Craft, he saw a chance.
By then Wilson had been climbing and walking for 15 years, starting with a holiday in the Lake District in 1953, the year Everest was climbed. He had grown up with the future communist organiser Dave Cook, and the two had the mountains in common. They went to the Alps together for the first time on a Mountaineering Association course, climbing 19 peaks around Arolla. Although never a leading light, Wilson climbed a number of impressive alpine routes, including the Younggrat on the Breithorn.
In the 1960s, he was a charismatic force in the cool, young climbing scene that developed in Llanberis, north Wales. Competitive, boisterous and opinionated, Wilson was a shrewd observer of the talent around him. When he took over Mountain Craft, it very quickly became a natural platform to share his passion and use his connections. He soon bought the magazine, changed its name to Mountain, and relaunched it with a fresh new design that caught the mood of a rapidly changing world.
Through the 70s, Wilson maintained a network of correspondents around the world and for a while Mountain was the international forum for all things mountaineering. For all his ebullient confidence, Wilson was remarkably open and collegiate, a firebrand preacher who ran a very broad church, matching lofty overviews of the Himalayan scene with satirical takes on the pomposity of its stars by Tom Patey and the brilliant cartoonist Sheridan Anderson. The magazine had serious journalistic credentials, too, exposing fraudulent climbers and producing exemplary coverage of the Cairngorm tragedy in 1971 when six young people perished in a storm.
On top of all this, Wilson was immersed in the hurly-burly of climbing politics, with an occasionally Machiavellian relish, campaigning for women to join the Climbers’ Club, sitting on committees of the British Mountaineering Council, advising guidebook writers, steering policy and all the while making his strong opinions known to succeeding generations of new stars about the ethical direction his beloved mountaineering should take. It made him, in many ways, a conscience of the sport.
He met his wife, Gloria, living in north London in the mid 1960s. They married in 1971, had two sons, Andrew and Owen, and moved to Cheshire. They all survive him.
• Kenneth John Wilson, publisher and editor, born 7 February 1941; died 11 June 2016
